A second volume will appear in 2018, THE THRIVING PROFESSOR.
"I remember with fondness the advice Martin Krieger gave me when I was writing THE SECOND SELF and my tenure case was soon to come up. He said, 'Write every day, you can always revise later.' Krieger is an ally who keeps pragmatism and scholarly aspiration in his sights. Only that strategy will help you have the career of your dreams."
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Uncertainty--when you haven't a clue, when it makes little sense to pretend you have information, when probability, markets, and strategy are unlikely to be of great use.

The End of (Economic) Growth--If Robert Gordon is correct that we have been living high on the hog from 1870-1970, plus a decade from 1994-2004, in effect floating on a rising tide, and that tide is now going out not likely to return in the next decades, what does that mean?

Intractable Problems, for which we can do something, but they return or are never worked out. Matters of race, of insufficient education and training, of deliberate attempts to game the system being justified, congestion and the time it absorbs. There are the recurrent issues of nuclear war and epidemic, of disaster and inadequate preparation and resilience, and of young people finding themselves leading lives that are criminal and dangerous. Alcohol and opiates and conventional addictive drugs.

The University of the Future--The notion of teaching is becoming a matter of didactic and instructional efficiency, with matters of modeling and mentoring, of thinking and criticism, falling by the wayside. The research enterprise is almost surely too big, and the incentives for research force people who would otherwise do something useful into a world of weak scholarship. Likely, about 20% of our research productive-scholars would be more than enough. Fischer Black said something to the effect that we ought be paid to teach, in effect to discourage research that is not driven by the need to find out.

"Isee our university system as similar
to the former Soviet empire, and as having similar problems . . . teaching and research
are too uniform. They do not respond quickly to shifts in tastes and
technology. . . . And, most important, teaching and research cost too much. . .
. The basic problem is that we have too much research, and the wrong kind of
research, because governments, firms, foundations, and generous alumni support
it.[i]

Counting and Scaling: Often when we enumerate something, perhaps weighting each case by a function of that case's "energy" or significance, we end up with a sum that exhibits scaling--much as a sum the values of identical independent random variables produces a distribution, often a Gaussian, that builds in such scaling. What is going on?

In future posts I will be writing about the biggest issues, leaving aside the concerns with the academic life that have informed this blog since it began. There is little new to say about Scholars' Survival, and I will leave it to other. But it makes sense to take on other issues...

Perhaps I am the last of you to have looked at
Robert Gordon's 2016 book on the history of American economic growth. But
if not, Gordon's study has deep implications for what we are trying to do in
our teaching and research.

Briefly, the great spurt of 1870-1970 in American economic growth
was a one-time wonder. What has happened since is greater inequality, where
most of the growth goes to the top 1%. He outlines the big headwinds we
face--demographic, for example. We can through various aspects of tax policy
make a difference (but those aspects are very different than the ones proposed
by Trump/Ryan/McConnell).

The book is sobering. Most of our students, and all of our
faculty, came of age during the period when growth has been slowing down.
There are no signs that that slowdown is about to end. When we look back to
that period pre-1970, we are likely ignoring the evidence of the last almost 50
years.

We might be asking ourselves: What are the best policy,
planning, and development strategies in these times of ongoing slow growth, where
in fact whatever we do in terms of policy little will change. Yes, increasing
skilled immigrants, more progressive taxation, etc., will help, but the major
forces of the past are no longer available. Of course, economic growth is not
the only measure of societal well being, so we might look elsewhere for
resources.

If I have misread the book, please correct me.

---------------------------------------------------

As long as I
have been involved with planning and policy schools, now almost fifty years,
there have been two pervasive themes: inequality/empowerment and
efficiency/fairness. If we increased wages, then producers would be encouraged
to invest in more efficient machinery and organization, so providing one source
of robustness. For industries where technological improvements were not
available, as in universities and symphonies, no such efficiencies were
possible and so costs and prices have risen disproportionately, as
William Baumol argued years ago.

My
involvement has been in this period of slower growth, where it is unlikely
that any of the sources of 1870-1970 were available to supply windfall bonuses.
And it is unlikely, according to Gordon, to have those sources available any
time soon.

For
a public policy school, one with a substantial concern for urban development
and for a major institution such as health, what should we be teaching?
Presumably, there is still room for marginal improvements on the efficiency
frontier, and so much of what we teach and research is exactly at that point.
What we do not yet provide is a way of thinking and working to a different
future, a different conception of policy, planning, etc.--although there is
enormous room to work on inequality and fairness.

Those
who feel left out but who had benefitted unwittingly from the great growth
period, in a sense the archetype of the Trump base (I have no idea if that is a
good category), are likely to find the future rather more disenchanted--for
they thought that their well being was a matter of their own initiative
and hard work, when in fact it was rather a matter of a rising tide on which
they floated. Finding various scapegoats or sources of their disenchantment,
they miss the point that the tide as gone out never to return in their
lifetimes. It is tragic and comic at the same time. (Curiously, the great
demographic transition in the US, from workers to retirees, would be in part
remedied by more immigration rather than less. Or, the availability of
contraceptives and ready abortions likely reduced the population of those
potential to become low-level law-breakers, and hence the decline of
crime in the last decade or two--and hence, given recent political moves, the
likely rise in the next two decades.)

Those
who might be called liberal or centrist are warranted to work on inequality,
but that too won't make the tide return, although fairness is a political good.
Regulation of the world of money and finance makes it less likely we have
epidemics of imprudent risk-taking, but I am "encouraged" by
human device and desire in the world of greed and gaming.

So
what are we doing in our fields? If it is marginal improvement, that is
very important. But as far as I can tell, there is little in the way of
invention, political or technical or ..., that would point the way forward. I
remain grateful for medical advances in the last fifty years, for computational
improvements that lead to new ways of living, and for mechanical improvements
that make for LA's better air (albeit big trucks and our port are still major
sources of crud in the air). Little compares to antibiotics, the telephone or
even IBM 360 machines, or the automatic transmission, though.

Recent books are: Urban Tomographies (2011), Doing Physics (2012), The Scholar's Survival Manual (2013), and there will be a second edition of my Doing Mathematics (2003). For the last fifteen years I have been doing systematic photographic, video, and aural documentation of Los Angeles and Southern California. For more on me and my work, go to